GNU/Linux meets the Dead

Let’s talk avatars: I’ve never had one, only because my only experience with them have come at the hands of playing fantasy sports on Yahoo!, and because Yahoo! doesn’t have a balding, bearded 50-year-old avatar, I considered myself out of luck.

So after signing up to ask a question in the Ubuntu forums about why Xubuntu acts the way it does (and the question was answered quickly), I poked around in my profile to see what this avatar thing was all about. To my pleasant surprise, I found that I could make one within a various set of parameters and file types, and this allowed me to give GIMP a pretty good going-over.

Merging two of my favorite things — GNU/Linux and the Grateful Dead — I made up the following avatar: Tux bearing the legendary Steal Your Face logo. I believe this avatar is in the area of 60-by-80 pixels and, if you like GNU/Linux and the Dead, feel free to use it. It was either that, or get the bears to wear Tux shirts, or have the dancing terrapins at Terrapin Station beating a tambourine with Tux on it. The possibilities of merging the two are boundless.

For my next trick, maybe using ImageMagick next time, we can have the Xubuntu symbol on Tux’s belly . . .

Nevertheless, again, it’s out there and it’s free to use. Credit me if you like, but it’s not mandatory.

(Larry the Open Source Guy is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)